Facebook Barometer | Facebook Page Analytics Tool

What you’ll get

Are your engagement rates above or below the average measured against similarly sized Facebook pages? Let the Facebook Barometer tell you how your most recent Facebook posts are REALLY doing.

Instant Feedback

Gain insight on how well your Facebook community likes — or doesn’t like — your page posts.

Competitive Analysis

Uncover how your Facebook metrics compare to similar-sized pages.

Strategy Accountability

Understand which areas of your Facebook strategy need extra effort.

"Facebook Barometer is a great free tool from Agorapulse to benchmark your Facebook page. Try it if you want to assess the performance of your page."- Natchi Lazarus, Social Media Consultant & Cofounder of Open Minds Agency

"Looking to see how well your Facebook page is doing against Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm? A free new service now lets page administrators see if their page is beating Facebook’s Edgerank metric. Agorapulse has released an EdgeRank benchmarking tool called Facebook Page Barometer, to help marketers gauge performance.”- Greg Finn, Director of Marketing for Cypress North

6 Reasons to Use the Facebook Barometer

Access Facebook Page Insights Unavailable Elsewhere

When measuring Facebook engagement with our Facebook Barometer, it’s prorated with the number of people you’ve reached with your last 50 posts. This data is not publicly available anywhere else.

This is unlike any other publicly available Facebook page analytics tool as this data is specifically shared with the Barometer tool.

Know Where You Rank Against Your Facebook Competitors

With the Facebook Barometer you’ll get to know where you stand among Facebook pages with a similar range of fans – this will be great to use in your Facebook competitor analysis. You’ll learn if you’re beating the Facebook Algorithm and which metrics require your immediate attention.

Knowing how you perform up against companies on your Facebook competitors list will give you a head start optimizing your Facebook strategy.

This data will give you Facebook insights metrics that will help you create smarter campaigns and messaging.

Weekly Facebook Insight for Reporting

If you like the additional Facebook insights you get on the performance of your posts, make Facebook engagement benchmarks from the Barometer part of your weekly/monthly performance reporting.

These metrics let you know what is and isn’t working for your audience so you can make necessary changes. Once you begin benchmarking your results, revisit your goals each time you complete your reports for consistent Facebook audience insights.

Test Your Facebook Strategy

Once you begin reporting your Facebook Barometer results, use this data to test your social strategy on Facebook. The Barometer is based on your last 50 posts, so testing will allow you to continue improving your messaging to your audience each month which will increase your average Facebook engagement rate.

Get More Data Alongside Your Facebook Insights Tool

The reality is, every company you’re competing with is using Facebook Insights. If you’re still unsure how to use Facebook Insights, we posted a series of blog posts that can help.

Using the Facebook Barometer alongside your Facebook Insights tool will give you the edge you need to stand out amongst the competition simply because you’ll have access to data they don’t.

How the Facebook Barometer Works

Once you sign into the Barometer with your Facebook account, choose the page you would like to analyze with our Facebook page analytics tool. The Barometer will determine how many fans this page has and will compare it to thousands of other pages with a similar fan range.

Each Facebook metric also uses a heat map color spectrum — green and red being the dominant colors on a scale. For example, a square in a darker green is doing slighter better than a square in lighter green and a darker red square is doing slightly worse than a lighter red square.

With this scale, you can easily tell what you should be working on to better your Barometer score.Underneath that heat map grid you will see monthly page insights for viral and organic reach on Facebook — day-by-day over the last 30 days. You can select the “Last 30 Days” dropdown menu to see reach over the last 90 or 180 days.

How to Improve Your Facebook Barometer Score

After you take a look at your Facebook Barometer performance, you may be interested in knowing how to improve your score. Here are a few Facebook best practices that have worked for other Barometer users.

Facebook Post Frequency

Unless you get a ton of negative feedback on Facebook, it’s never a bad idea to reconsider the frequency of your posts, considering the valuable real estate you’re fighting for on your fans’ newsfeeds.

Try doubling — or halving — the amount of posts you publish over the next month. Then, return to the Barometer and see if your ‘fans reached’, ‘engagement,’ and ‘people talk about’ metrics improve.

Facebook Post Timing

Consider the locations your audience is by looking at your Facebook Page Insights to determine where the majority of your fans are coming from. You should also consider when your audience tends to be active on Facebook — late at night, lunch time?

If your ideal posting time falls outside of normal working hours, you should begin scheduling your posts during peak hours for optimal opportunity.

Schedule Facebook posts during optimal hours by:

Scheduling each post directly on Facebook using the built-in feature in the publish drop-down button

Or, if you use a social media management tool, using the “schedule post” feature based on behavior and geography

Facebook Post Quality

Visual social media content is key. Try adding more short videos, photos, and animated GIFs in your social media content schedule to mix things up and keep your audience engaged.

In addition, if you have original evergreen content such as a blog, you may consider reposting popular blogs several times on Facebook. Fans’ newsfeeds are busy so it’s likely many missed it the first time. Plus, you may have new fans it may interest!

Tip: Do consider the negative feedbackmetric on your Barometer by making sure you do not repost a specific piece of content too soon after you previously posted it.

You may also want to attempt reducing your promotional posts by half for one month to see if your metrics improve — people do not like to be sold to!

Facebook Advertising Budget

Regardless how often you post, Facebook will not allow all of your fans see your post unless you promote it. Allocating Facebook advertising dollars to your Facebook posts will give you the best opportunity for a post to reach its full potential.

Pinpoint your popular content and allocate your budget to those posts for your Facebook advertising efforts. By doing this, you should see your ‘Facebook engagement’ and ‘People Talking About This’ Barometer metrics increase.

Facebook Barometer Enhancements

We created the Facebook Barometer tool to help Facebook marketers audit and analyze their Facebook page(s) and compare themselves to pages with similar fan count.

We recently passed a pretty big milestone: the Facebook Barometer has analyzed over 40,000 Facebook pages. That’s an incredible amount of insight and Facebook statistics that we’ve offered to Facebook marketers around the world, all for free.

We consistently take all of this data included in Facebook analytics and use it to improve the our Facebook page analytics tool.

Facebook Best Practices

It’s sometimes difficult to stand out on your Facebook business page. A competitive advantage on Facebook can really make a difference; follow these Facebook best practices and you may win over your audience.

Keep Your Facebook Posts Short

All Facebook posts should be short and concise to best capture attention and engagement of your audience. After all, your fans will be interacting on Facebook rather quickly.

Try keeping your posts around 100 characters — under 40 where possible —very short posts tend to have much higher engagement!

Ask Questions to Increase Facebook Engagement

A question is the easiest way to connect and increase Facebook engagement, but make your questions simple! The easier, the better. For example, “what’s your favorite social media tool?” will get a better response than, “what do you like about social media?”

Practice guiding your audience toward an answer instead of making questions open-ended! Your new Facebook page analytics tool, Facebook Barometer, will let you know if this strategy works for you.

Share Other Content

Be social by sharing content from other Facebook pages. This is an easy way to connect with other businesses. Share from other businesses and thought leaders in your industry that have also have a good fan-base and engaging content.

You’ll provide your fans with improved content that allows them to absorb themselves in your industry.

Be Relevant

Don’t waste your fans’ time by posting irrelevant information like funny videos of cats (unless you’re a cat food company). However, you shouldn’t always post content directly related to your company ALL of the time.

Share content within your industry or geographic area; get to know what your audience is interested in.

For example, if you sell books in Atlanta; post about best places to cozy up and read, book-worm jokes, or the newest best-seller that’s a must-read. This will connect with your fans and create a community.

Don’t Be Afraid of Change

Social media schedule variety is important. If you only post links to your website or cat pictures, engagement will decrease. Make a large chunk of your posts non-promotional but relevant so it’s easier to hold your audience’s attention over time.

Share Images That Follow Facebook Guidelines

Colored visuals increase a fan’s likelihood of reading your post by 80% (if well designed). That’s a huge increase in Facebook page engagement! Following image guidelines can save you from a lot of hassle on Facebook. Below are Facebook image rules to keep in mind.

Image text cannot cover more than 20%

Facebook cover images must be properly sized

Misleading elements such as a play button are not allowed

Lottery, money, or pharmaceutical promotion is unacceptable

Images cannot be Facebook branded or associated

Before/after images are often taken down

Avoid Controversial Facebook Posts

All investigations in a photo begin from a user flagging as inappropriate. If this happens to one of your posts, Facebook can indefinitely suspend your page for violating guidelines. You may have no warning or no chance to find out what it was that was considered offensive.

It’s always best to play it safe and avoid anything controversial on your organization’s Facebook page. If you’re posting something that includes offensive material but is meant to be ‘anti-racist’ for example, clearly state your objective.

What are People Saying about the Facebook Barometer

“Facebook marketing platform Agorapulse has a fantastically useful tool called the Barometer. You go in, connect to Facebook, and add your page. Give the magic elves a minute to run into the Interwebs to gather the data, and presto! You’ve been benchmarked.”

Nick Vivion, Tnooz reporter

“Looking to see how well your Facebook page is doing against Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm? A free new service now lets page administrators see if their page is beating Facebook’s Edgerank metric. Agorapulse has released an EdgeRank benchmarking tool called Facebook Page Barometer, to help marketers gauge performance.”

“The lesson of the day is this: instead of comparing yourself to others, compare yourself to yourself [with the Facebook Barometer]. If you have more followers and a higher reach percentage than you did three months ago, you’re doing something right.”

Cynthia Boris of Marketing Pilgrim

“Facebook Barometer is a great free tool from Agorapulse to benchmark your Facebook page. Try it if you want to assess the performance of your page. Using this free tool, you can measure the performance of your Facebook page by benchmarking it with more than [15,000] Facebook pages in the database of Agorapulse. The percentage values are based on the last 50 posts on your page, so you get an idea of the impact of your recent activity.

“Agorapulse, which tracks page and post performance for brands such as PlayStation and McDonald’s, now offers Barometer for page managers who understand that their pages have certain averages for reach or engagement, but who want to figure out if that’s good or not.”

“Fortunately there is a wonderful tool developed by Agorapulse, called [Facebook] Barometer, which obtains your pages data and then it compares it with Facebook average figures. How does Agorapulse Barometer obtain this information? Every time a new Page uses the service and thus gives access to their own metrics, these are used not only to show the Page performance, but also to adjust the data on their database.”

Antonio Calero, Social Media Consultant

“By choosing eight key metrics and comparing them to the ‘average’ Pages on the sample, it goes some way towards keeping things simple, and this is designed to give a clear idea on what areas you’re failing in , and what you could be doing better. And by including the fan-count metric, this helps you compare your page to the average for other Pages of a similar size [since size does affect Facebook reach a lot].”

Paul Sawers, The Next Web reporter

“With Agorapulse Barometer, you can produce a very easy-to-understand summary report of your Page’s performance, and focusing on how you compare against competitors helps you strive for improvements.”